Selerity Inc., a data-scraping financial website, composed tweets that exposed Twitter's revenue figures an hour before the social media site was set to report its quarterly earnings.
The tweets revealed Twitter's 18 percent decrease in revenue.
LA Times reported that the New York firm that was responsible for the series of tweets about the social media's revenue figures discovered Twitter's quarterly results that were hidden from normal searches. It began releasing the information in a series of tweets to make clients aware.
About 20 minutes after the leak, the New York Stock Exchange halted the stock trading. It was resumed after Twitter released its official earning report and, by then, a lot of sell orders for the stocks flooded the market, most of which were automatic or computer generated.
The stock closed at $42.27, down from the previous value of $51.66 - a decline of 18.2 percent.
There are a lot of reasons for the revenue loss that Twitter has been experiencing in the last quarter, and slowing user growth is one of them. Newcomers to the social media site find it difficult to navigate the pages, while a lot of users have stopped using the site altogether.
The company has spent the last year trying to provide upgrades and features in order to retain old users and acquire new ones, while keeping its uniqueness over other social media sites.
The trading day ended not just with disappointing first-quarter results, but also left the company with a dim outlook on its future.
